The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State | Simon Elmer

With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years, there was an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus ‘crisis’ was over. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place — war in the Ukraine, the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ and the return of the environmental crisis — it’s increasingly difficult not to look back on ‘lockdown’ as the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government, but is no less real for that.Show more

The willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism — and something like the return of fascism — to the governmental, juridical and cultural forms of the formerly neoliberal democracies of the West, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the validity of this thesis. Its purpose in doing so, however, is not to contribute to an academic debate about the meaning of the term ‘fascism’, but rather to interrogate how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West over the past two-and-a-half years has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to examine to what ends that collapse is being used.

Simon received his PhD in 2002 in the History and Theory of Art from University College London. He has taught at the Universities of London, Manchester and Reading and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan for two years. In 2015 he co-founded Architects for Social Housing, for which he is Head of Research.

A prolific writer, Simon has numerous books and collections to his name, including:
Implementing the UK Biosecurity State (2020);
Brave New World: Expanding the UK Biosecurity State through the Winter of 2020-2021 (2021);
Virtue and Terror: Resisting the UK Biosecurity State (2021);

He also writes and researches on the UK housing crisis.

The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State can be purchased here: https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2022/09/28/the-road-to-fascism-for-a-critique-of-the-global-biosecurity-state/

The Covid event has revealed that it was about more than just public health and the political, economic and societal aspects of the response are of far greater significance than the virus itself. There remains a continued drive toward the transformation of our societies in ways that threaten democracy and our existing ways of life. Open Society Sessions aim to examine the political, societal and economic dimensions of our recent experience and analyse developments in the future.

Watch more Open Society Sessions: https://www.pandata.org/open-society-sessions
Support our work: https://www.pandata.org/donate